LinkedIn Data Shows More Women In STEM Roles, But Slow Pace Of Change

In honor of this year’s International Women’s Day, LinkedIn has released new research examining how women’s roles in the workforce have advanced over the past 40 years.

The findings show that while there have been gains towards economic parity, the progress for women has been slow: Over the past 10 years, the proportion of female leaders in the workforce has increased by an average of just over 2 percentage points among the 12 industries studied.

Other key findings include:

More women are entering STEM fields than any other roles: STEM-based roles show the most change in female representation, with a nearly 25 per cent increase in female representation overall in the Software & IT industry and nearly 30 per cent increase in Hardware & Networking.

However, not all STEM roles are attracting women at equal rates: The software development industry has seen very little change, with women making up just over 20 per cent of total professionals, and the number of female data analysts dropping more than 10 per cent.

Women in leadership roles continue to make strides: When examining the shift of hiring of female leaders in the last eight years, the research found a higher rate of change among traditionally male-dominated industries like Software & IT Services (27 per cent increase in female leadership, manufacturing (26 per cent increase), and entertainment (24 per cent increase).

To generate this analysis, LinkedIn looked at a member’s first position after earning an Associate’s Degree or Bachelor’s Degree (limited to 4 years after graduation, and excluding internships) to understand what types of roles women were entering each decade. To generate growth figures, we compared women entering the workforce between 1978 – 1987 to those entering between 2008 – 2017 to understand the differences between the two decades. This data was examined at a global level across LinkedIn’s platform, however only countries where at least two-thirds of members had associated genders were included.